The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  “Why?”

  “So that the letter-frequencies are representative.”

  “I see. No problem,” I said. I began to type, in the self-conscious way people do when they’re testing typewriters and computers at a store, though in my case the words I was typing were not being recorded anywhere. It’s strange to be typing here in this magnet, I clicked out on the keys. But I kind of like it I’ve never typed supine before. I recommend it to all interested parties. This keyboard has a nice sloppy feel, probably because it’s been messed with inside and doesn’t work. Feels like some of the old Wang keyboards. Since it is dysfunctional, I suppose I can type anything I want. Doctor Susan could possibly follow my fingers on a video monitor to find out what I’m typing, or study the tape later, but I doubt very much she’ll bother. She’s cheerfully all business. She really attracts me. That’s not surprising—it is much more surprising to me when a woman fails to attract me than when she does attract me. Very occasionally I meet a woman and afterward I think, That’s incredible—nothing about that woman attracted me. It almost never happens. All women merit love and constancy. That’s true. All women should be loved by someone good and dependable and honest. I am good, I think, but I am not honest or dependable, so I have to pass lovingly through their lives without their knowing I have been there. Man I like Dr. Susan’s tits under that lab coat, with that name pinned on one. Short funny forty-year-old women with big tits should reign supreme. Or if I could just cycle between silky-voiced tall women with small tits and short happy women with big tits—plus medium-sized affectionately sexy women with medium-sized tits and short women with small tits and southern accents, and medium-sized women with small tits and Hispanic accents—now there would be a life. I like the fact that Dr. Susan doesn’t know that I’m typing how much I’d like her to squat over me and rip open the white cotton crotch of her black pantyhose and grind her salty puss into my face. I stopped pre tend-typing. “Is that enough?” I asked.

  Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “That’s plenty. We’ve got a good fix on your nerve now. Can you type the reference sentence again? You remember?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I think I forgot it.”

  “ ‘The cure for the greatest … part of human … miseries is not radical …’ ”

  “ ‘… but palliative,’ ” I finished, eager to prove to her that I was no clerical robot, but rather a typist who reflected on whatever he was asked to type. “Got it.”

  “How about pain levels?” she asked.

  I snapped my finger several times to test how my wrist felt. “I feel the usual tingling in the base of my palm and some significant forearm involvement.”

  “Fine,” she said. “We can go back to the keyboard later if we need to. I want you to put it aside now. Good. Except for your arm pain, are you comfortable? Are you ready to start masturbating?”

  I told her I was.

  “Okay, in just a minute I’ll ask you to start.”

  I lay at peace, with my hands resting on my chest. I heard some more murmured conversation on the intercom, then, “Arno, why don’t you go ahead and start.”

  “Can I lift my knees?”

  “Can he lift his knees?” I heard her ask. Then: “Better not. We lose you on one of the axial monitors. Is it going to be a problem to proceed with your legs flat?”

  “Not at all—it’s fine,” I said. “Can you see me? I mean, not my nerves, but me?”

  “Yes. We have several video monitors in addition to the MR image.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Be sure to let us know any changes in the pain you feel,” she said. “Keep a running commentary, if you can.”

  I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The problem is that the pleasure from one source masks the pain from the other source,” I said. “I think that’s part of the reason it’s gotten this bad. But, okay, I’m touching my—penile organ now. I have it, as I guess you can see, in the thumb-and-finger grip that we discussed. We might call it the Kokomo grip. I’m beginning to tug on it slowly, using the Kokomo grip, and at the moment I feel no distinct pain—well, there is a warm twinge, but nothing bad.” Since I had avoided all orgasms for three days, I expected to have little trouble getting hot and nasty, even enveloped as I was in an electromagnetic field so powerful that it could potentially suck oxygen tanks and scissors and other ferrous objects lethally into the chamber with me. When I was fully erect, I held my richard vertically for a moment by its base, wanting everyone in the control room to get an eyeful of it on the monitors.

  “Hold that for a second,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, unexpectedly. “Don’t move. We need to get a fix on those R-points. Just hold still. Good. Great. Good. You still comfortable?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. You seem comfortable. Now we need to get a few motion-profiles. This is an entirely new repetitive motion for the real-time tracking system, so you have to bear with us, please. The software is going to teach itself to follow your arm. Okay—first will you go ahead and masturbate slowly, just as you would typically do it perhaps in an early phase.”

  “In an early phase …” I mused. “Probably I would change to the tight-fisted grip. And probably I’d squeeze it hard while I pumped it very slowly up and down. Like this.” I parted my legs, so that my feet rested on the curving, culvert-like walls of the magnet’s bore, and pumped. “Ooo, I like to feel the little hole get pulled open when I pump.”

  “Great, thanks. Okay.” There was more murmuring among the researchers. I loved being studied. I loved that my simple self-pumping pleasure was going to yield scientific results. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman came back on and said, “Arno, now could you stimulate your penis fast?”

  “How fast?”

  “As fast as you normally might. We want to be sure we don’t lose the image when you get serious.”

  “I understand.” I pounded my cock as if I were shaking a daiquiri in a busy bar, as if I were applauding after a marvelous performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, as if I were playing the only maraca in a salsa band. My body bounced and flopped on the vinyl pads.

  “Whoa,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman.

  “Could you track that?” I asked.

  “No way,” she said. “Go slower. Slower.”

  “How about that?”

  “Nope. Slower. Slower. Slower still. Slower. There! That’s the fastest you can go. Is that going to be fast enough?”

  I made a doubtful noise. “That is awfully slow. Isn’t that about how slow I was going when you asked me to demonstrate my slow speed? I really honestly don’t know that I will be able to come going that slow.”

  There was some inaudible conferring on their side of the intercom. Then Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “Okay, that’s fine, Arno. Not to worry. Give us a second. We’re going to try something different. Just hang on for a moment.”

  “On the other hand,” I added in a thoughtful tone. “I guess you don’t need me to come, right? There is no real reason why I need to come for this motion study. How self-centered of me.”

  Dr. Orowitz-Rudman’s voice came on. “On the contrary, I think it’s crucial for the success of this preliminary study that you masturbate straight through. You yourself alluded to the reason why just a moment ago. As you approach climax, you will be feeling such pleasure and stroking your penis so fast that you’ll be much more likely to traumatize the nerve-sheath without knowing it.”

  “You’re quite right,” I said. “I do have to come.”

  “Just give us another second to tune the gate-and-correlate software. You see,” she explained, “we have to be able to stay fixed on precisely the same cross-section of one tiny region in your arm, no matter how fast you move or how you turn, which is no easy task. We do it with the help of an entirely separate optical tracking system. The optical system, by the way, incorporates some hardware that was originally developed by Martin Marietta for one of the Defense Department’s target recognition programs. It does two hundred and fifty compares a second, whi
ch is very fast—it should be fast enough for this application.”

  “So I wouldn’t be here naked, doing this, if it weren’t for the Department of Defense?” I said. “There you go. Who says military research doesn’t have humanitarian payoffs?”

  “Bear with us for just a little longer, Arno,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. I gave my richard a couple of maintenance strokes every fifteen seconds or so. Finally I heard her say, “Okay, we’re set. You may start actual masturbation at any time.”

  “Okay, I’m starting,” I said. “I’m back to the Kokomo grip. It doesn’t feel all that great yet—I’m doing it because I know it will feel good very shortly. There is some definite tingling-action in my fingers. I’ll give you a play-by-play. This is great to be allowed to jerk off in a fucking mega-magnet like this. I just know I’m going to be a different person after I come in this big-mama magnet. Focus it right on my big dick. Pardon my language: if you want me to talk while I do it, I’m going to have to talk dirty. You know what it reminds me of? Zardoz. Zardoz is a movie with Sean Connery. These superior beings bring Connery into their ship, and the woman superior being who is in charge of researching him tries to find out what makes his heart beat faster. They project various sexual images on a screen in the spaceship to see how he will react—a pair of breasts being soaped up, for example. His brain-wave levels remain utterly calm and unmoved. And then Connery looks straight at her, at the woman researcher, and instantly the EEG oscilloscopes start hopping and beeping right off the chart. So it’s the superior being who gets him wild. Now, it seems a little implausible to me that the soaped-up breasts would do nothing at all for Connery—they certainly did something for me when I saw this movie back in the seventies. I haven’t seen it since and yet I remember it as the finest footage of soaped-up breasts I’ve ever seen, partly because it was so teasingly quick.”

  “Arno—the pain in your arm,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “What is its status?”

  “Sorry. I’m experiencing a little more pain just above my wrist, and a cold feeling in my hand. But it hurts good, it’s well worth it. I’m going to shift to the fist-fucking grip. Yeah, there we go. Yeah! To come for you here this evening, I think I’m going to adapt that scene in Zardoz: I’m going to think of a guy who is asked to masturbate inside a huge magnetic tunnel while three women superior beings observe his carpal tunnel. They are interested in determining with scientific certitude whether his masturbation contributes to his nervous inflammation. It almost certainly does, but they want to capture the images of the poor frail nerve leading to his hand getting squeezed and traumatized as he gives himself pleasure. They are trying out some brand-new fancy software that focuses the magnetic field in a new way. This software uses some tricks refined over at CERN, in fact. But this new software has a bug; it has a serious unintended side-effect on this masturbating man. They trim his pubic hair, they dot his dick in a tribal pattern, they shove him in the magnet, and they tell him to start jacking off, and then, as his hand is shuffling smoothly up and down on his penis, some kind of bizarre, anomalous micro-funnel develops in the universal core of time. A chronomaly. Within the magnet, time is sucked in on itself and twisted and compressed in such a way that the man’s nerve—which is where all the analytic strength of the resonating system is focused—his nerve acquires the ability to stop and start time’s progress at will. What happens is: the man’s arm heats up for a second, tingling, as if it’s in a microwave on defrost, and then he discovers that he can put humanity on hold every time he snaps his middle finger. He lets go of his dick and he tries it out. Like this: snap.”

  I snapped my fingers. At once I was lying in complete euphoric silence. My Fold-powers were back.

  I crawled out of the machine and walked naked into the control room, my weighty richard leading the way. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman was wearing headphones. She was leaning back in her chair, her hand resting thoughtfully on her mouth, frowning in concentration at a monitor that showed an image of me lying feet first, legs parted, with my hand clutching my erection. I’d never seen myself from that angle before. It was not a pretty sight. One of the associates was sitting at the other large monitor, which showed a long glowing thing that was apparently the nerve in my wrist done up in the usual intense greens and blues and oranges. The other woman, the Chinese woman, was standing behind Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, looking on.

  I knelt and opened Dr. Orowitz-Rudman’s lab coat and pulled her ribbed green turtleneck out of her pants. I bunched it up at her collarbone and pulled the cups of her bra down so her nipples popped out. They were erect, I was pleased to notice, and surprisingly dark, like two Raisinets. “I can’t help it—I need to suck your tits,” I said to her, and I did, tactfully, untheatrically. I wrote, “Thanks,” on a white Post-It note and stuck it on her left breast. Then I put her clothes back in order and went back in the scan room and climbed into the magnet and resumed my former position. I snapped my fingers again. The noise of the coolant started back up.

  Immediately I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman exclaim, “Whoops! Lost our fix. Arno, we lost our fix on you. What happened in there?”

  “I snapped my fingers.”

  “Okay, look, please don’t do that. There are limits to our tracking system. Just keep stroking your penis if you can.”

  “How much longer do you want me to continue?” I asked. I was jubilant at having my powers back.

  “How much pain are you in?” she asked.

  “Mmm, this is about as painful as it gets—tingling up my whole forearm,” I reported.

  “I think you should go ahead and climax soon. I think we’ve got enough now to generate quite a thorough neural conductivity profile.”

  “You want me to come for you?” The foul-patter urge was rising in me.

  “Yes,” she said neutrally.

  “You want it? You want to see it? Oh, God, I want to give it to you. This guy, this guy who’s in the MRI machine, he snaps his fingers and time stops. He understands what’s going on, he’s not freaked, because it happened once before when somebody put a sample of his blood in a centrifuge and spun it very fast and time was interrupted. So time is stopped, and he crawls out of the machine, naked, jerking on his big swollen dick-knob, and he scampers into the control room and he throws back the doctor’s lab coat and pulls up her shirt and brings her tits out and he laps at them. That’s what he’s wanted from the moment he saw her, he’s wanted to suckle.

  those hard little nipples with his mouth—oh, man, ma-ha-ha-ha-han—”

  “A little slower if you can, Arno,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman gently. “The image is degrading.”

  “I forgot. I’ll try. I’ll try. And so then he puts her tits back in her bra and tucks her shirt in and scampers back into the magnet and he lies there on the pad just where he was and snaps his fingers, and time starts up again, and he lies there thinking of the tits he has just sucked on, how great they felt in his hands, and it’s such a tremendous thought that he has to come, he doesn’t care how much it hurts—oh, that’s right. I want to come inside your magnet, doctor. It hurts, but I don’t care. I like you to take all kinds of graphic pictures of my nerve while I pump this hot nasty piece of meat off for you. I like being hard and hot in your core. Oh, doctor. Doctor? I’ve got to call you Susan when I come. Sorry. Is that okay?”

  “That’s okay,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Just try to stroke a little slower, if it’s at all possible.”

  “Oh, thank you. Oh Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan, uff, uffuck. Tell me you want to see me come. I want to hear you say it.”

  I heard only silence over the intercom, and then: “As I said before, I do think it’s important for you to climax.”

  “I will climax, you bet, you got it. I’m going to think of your tits and climax. Oh, you gave me your lipstick to hold. That was so good of you. I wish I could’ve circled your lips and nipples with it. Oh that feels nice. Squeeze my meat, Susan. Squeeze it in your big magnetic hole. Open that hole up for me. Suck me in, baby. Oh God yeah. T
ighten that force down on my cock, uffuck. Uffuck. Here it is: oh yeah, oh fuck yeah. Oh yeah! Urrrrr!” I let the comeshots jump up and land on my stomach muscles. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, breathing peacefully. “Am I done?” I beatifically asked at last.

  “Almost,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Normally, at this point might you resume writing?”

  “If I’d been alternating writing and jacking, yes.”

  “Then could you type the baseline sentence again?” she said. “It might be useful to have. Remember it? ‘The cure …’?”

  “Don’t tell me!” I put the fake keyboard on my chest, avoiding the sperm, and typed the sentence from memory.

  The technicians dragged me out on the gantry and handed me a brown paper towel. I sat up, feeling a little sleepy and dazed, and put on my gown. In the control room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman met me and led me to the room where my clothes were.

  “I think that went well, don’t you?” she said.

  “I’m sorry I fixated so totally on you.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “We were fixated on you, you were fixated on us.”

  “It’s just that a woman doctor asking me to masturbate is like a dream come true …”

  “I understand—let’s not belabor it. My only regret is that the imaging system couldn’t quite keep up with you and I had to keep telling you to slow down. I hope you had an okay orgasm even so?”

  “Oh, it was a dandy. No, that was fine that you told me to slow down—slow is good.”

  She told me that I could set up an appointment with her in several weeks to go over the nerve-profiles. “But from what I saw on the monitors, I would suggest that you switch to your left hand if you want to get rid of your carpal-tunnel problem.”

  “I’ll begin tomorrow,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.” I couldn’t quite say “Susan” at this point.

  “Thank you for taking part,” she said. We shook hands. Then, smiling, she snapped her fingers. “Just like that?”

  “Right, just like that,” I said, pleased. I snapped my fingers for her, and while she stood fixedly, still in the midst of her good-natured, faintly flirtatious leave-taking smile, I kissed her name-tag and removed the white Post-It note from inside her bra. It would only have perplexed and disturbed her to discover it stuck to her breast (that soft, heavy, somewhat sticky breast) that evening. And what if she took off her bra in front of her husband, and he noticed it there before she did—a note saying THANKS on her breast? It would have caused needless suffering.